“A feeling?”
“Yes.” I also had a vision, but I couldn’t tell him that part. It wasn’t a vision like a dream, like a prophet’s guide or mystical knowledge. It was a vision of a man in a buckskin suit; and he was holding an axe over his shoulder and holding up his arm, as if to block that downward way.
If the spirit was Daniel Boone—and I was choosing to believe as much—then I had to assume he meant us no harm.
“Boone didn’t die in these caves,” I breathed. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
Meshack asked, “What?”
“I was only thinking aloud. Boone didn’t die in these caves. He died an old man in his bed. He made it past this cave. We can make it out.” That’s what I said, but it was thinking on my feet. What I meant was, Boone didn’t die here—but he’s come back. He knows what’s down here, and maybe he knows how to beat it.
Boone hadn’t wanted us to keep going down. He was trying to send us up.
If Meshack knew I was lying, he kept that information to himself.
Our passage narrowed again, immediately and harshly. On the other side of the tight spot there was another opening, and another set of forked paths. I counted four. Jacob pointed out a smaller route down in the floor that seemed to lead back too, so that made five alternatives, none of which looked better than the rest.
“Oh spirits,” I said, trying to make it sound like a curse—but it was actually a prayer.
My devotion and desperation must have shined through the short exclamation, because Jacob was unconvinced. “Don’t you start none of that funny shit,” he commanded.
“I’m only asking for help. At the moment, I think you’d agree, we could use any assistance we can summon.”
“Then pray to Jesus or something!” he threw his hands up, and the glow of his lantern kicked and wobbled. He was running low on oil, too. We were going to need those candles.
“You first,” I mumbled. I was scanning the narrow, dark premises, seeking some hint of divine intervention that was more easily interpreted than a burning bush or heavenly dove.
“Maybe we ought to,” his son said slowly. “Maybe we ought to close our eyes and try it.”
“Go on then, cast your own little spells and pretend they’re something else, if that’s how you want to handle this,” I said, and I did my best to keep the contempt out of my words, but I’m sure that I failed at least in part. “Do whatever you want, but for the love of whoever you worship, don’t close your eyes.”
Meshack was surprisingly silent during our small argument. He was watching it, and watching the walls, and watching the way behind us.
Finally he said, “They’re still coming.”
“And we’re still sitting here!” Nicodemus all but shouted. He blinked frantically back and forth between the options and then said, “Maybe we should split up? Go different directions? They can’t chase us all down, can they?”
Meshack said, “They can if there’s more of them than there are of us.”
“You think there are?” Nicodemus squeaked.
“I’m pretty sure of it, now that you ask.” He looked up at the stone curtains above and around us, and he frowned back at the way we’d come. “We can’t just keep running like this.”
Jacob glanced unhappily down at his lantern with its dwindling light. “What would you recommend then, farmer boy?”
“It’s like my uncle’s been saying, we’ve got to get up and get out. Or, if that don’t work, we’re going to have to find a place to hole up and hold them off.”
“How many bullets you think we brought?” Nicodemus asked, as if he couldn’t believe anyone would be dumb enough to suggest a stand-off.
Meshack didn’t pay any attention to the young man’s tone. “Between what we’ve got left and the pickaxes, we might can hold them long enough to figure something out. I’m not talking about making a stand—I mean we need to buy ourselves some time.” He turned to me, then. And there was a look on his face that was almost desperate. “You’re sure Titus is dead?” he asked.
“Yes,” I swore. “I’m sorry. I know you were friends, but he’s gone. I saw it happen.”
“You saw it happen,” he repeated. He wasn’t questioning me; he was tasting the words and finding them bitter.
A louder clamor and rustle popped and echoed up behind us. “Meshack, gentlemen,” I insisted. “We must do something!”
“Maybe we should go back,” Meshack said. “Go back to that little bottleneck there, and hold it like a fortress.”
I thought it was more likely he wanted to go back in case Titus had somehow fought his way through, but I didn’t interrupt him about it. I understood that he hadn’t seen it happen, so he couldn’t have known it the way I knew it.
There wasn’t any time to take such a course. The creatures were rising up, swarming their way through the bottleneck; we heard something stone and slippery crack and break, and we heard frenetic, scuttling claws climbing fast behind us.
“Which way?” Nicodemus demanded, and I didn’t know what to tell him.
“That way,” Meshack said quickly. There was no reason to argue. No one had any better ideas, so I clamored up the way he indicated. It was farther up and not down, so I approved. But Jacob’s earlier objection was rambling through my mind, and I thought that it would be a horrible way to drown—pinned against the ceiling by a rising tide of monstrous great bodies.
There was no right thing to do.
There was no right choice.
So I followed Meshack’s directions, and as I watched my lantern flame flicker and threaten to gutter, I stole a quick peek back at the source.
Meshack was bringing up the rear this time. He was charging towards me, his own lantern jerking back and forth as he pumped his legs as fast as they’d come up the broken and unpredictable terrain. “Go!” he shouted at me, and I tried, but I was transfixed by the action at the bottleneck.
In the few seconds between Meshack’s warning and his rough collision that carried me back, and up, and away from the scene… I saw Boone once more.
***
He was there. He hadn’t left us to die harried and lost in the darkness. The spirit was standing with the shadow of a great, glistening-sharp axe in his hands. His legs were spread, feet planted apart so the apparition of his body blocked the opening—and he waved that axe and I swear, the beasts were hesitating. They crawled over one another to back away from him, and to keep from touching him.
His ectoplasmic axe glistened a sharp and forbidding warning. He whipped it over his head, and back and forth, and down low, and high.
They could see him.
And he cut his passage with the blade, and they did not push at him—even though they could have surely leaped right through him.
***
“They can see him!” I gasped as Meshack barreled into me. The young farmer clapped one of his long arms around my chest and lurched us both through the next passageway. I didn’t struggle against him; I was only so shocked and bewildered by the sight of it.
I knew that beasts might see a spirit more easily than mankind, but I couldn’t shake the impression that they didn’t only see him, they recognized him.
It was a silly thing to think; it was a preposterous detail to assume, but I did—and as Meshack half shoved, half led me away, I silently prayed a universal thanks for the assistance, because it had come to us exactly as I asked. Then, realizing that I was squandering the lead we were being offered, I turned around in Meshack’s prodding grasp and began to run alongside him.
We hadn’t gone more than a few yards when a scream up ahead announced more trouble.
There was nowhere for us to go—and we’d built up enough speed that we couldn’t help but run headlong into it.
It was another one of the hideous bird-like monsters—so we had not three, not four, but at least five of them to contend with—and it had Nicodemus locked underneath one of its massive talons.
He rolled and twitched, and he swung h
is lantern up against the creature’s leg. It broke, and it caught—just like it had in that first chamber, back at the beginning. This one screamed too, another awful shriek that shook the pretty stone pillars and peaks in the ceiling above us. It spun around, flapping its massive wings and beating out most of the flame.
But it’d been distracted long enough for Jacob to go in low and grab his son. Meshack joined him, seizing one of the man’s legs and yanking him free of the beast that was stomping, crashing, spinning in the tight space.
The whole room reeked of smoke and burning feathers, and it was hard to see for all the blackened air—and now we were one light less than before.
It almost gave me a panic to think of it—yes, a worse panic than the flailing creature with the snapping beak that chomped at the air with a force that would have broken furniture. We were in a new chamber now, a smaller chamber that couldn’t have held even one more body for all the cramped space. Nicodemus was hurt, but for the moment he was more frightened than injured and he hustled up and over a short ledge with his father’s help.
Nicodemus had dropped his gun. It was lying on the ground, half aimed up from a crack where it had settled.
Meshack had his rifle drawn, but when he jerked the trigger something jammed and the long, loud machine didn’t fire.
I was almost relieved. I was beginning to fear for the integrity of our space. One more terrible noise and the whole place might come crashing down, and then wouldn’t we be buried!
But the beast’s neck stretched, faster and harder than any rubber band and it clamped that scissor-blade beak down on Meshack’s rifle. I was astonished when the metal barrel didn’t snip clean away, but it only bent sharply with the shape of the thing’s boney mouth. Meshack held the butt end of the gun and tried to wrestle it away but the bird-beast wasn’t finished with him yet. It kicked up an enormous foot, and my lamplight glittered against the enormous claws that tipped the end of each long toe.
Meshack almost folded himself in half as he ducked away. The claw sliced him, but barely, and cleanly, and across the torso. The scratch went from his collarbone to his lower left rib and it went red within the blink of a moment.
It could’ve been worse, I frantically assured myself. It could’ve been so much worse! Mere inches lower and deeper, and he’d be holding his own entrails. But it was a fleeting thought, and I gave it no time to take hold or inspire any comfort.
Meshack staggered back against the short ledge that the Manders had scaled as they fled. I could hear them, kicking and fighting against the very rock itself as they strained to haul themselves up, or back, or down, or however the corridor kinked and ran beyond the spot where we could see it.
And there was Nicodemus’s gun on the ground.
I had never fired a gun in my life. No, not even when I was young and I lived in the valley. I’ve always been terrified of them. The noise, the power, the devastation—but there was my nephew, and he had just assisted in the rescue of another man…a man who had then deserted us both.
I seized the gun and I aimed it at the creature. It turned to look me in the face. It saw a skinny old man with a dwindling lantern in one hand and a firearm held awkwardly in the other.
Meshack had pulled himself upright and was pushing his feet against the uneven wall, reaching up and back for the ledge. “John,” he wheezed. “Don’t.”
He must’ve thought the same thing I did. Too close to shoot. Too many rounded walls, boxing us all close and together. The seared scrape on my arm stung and reminded me of the way a bullet might bounce, and I was afraid, but I was also afraid of the smashed-moon face that glared with tufted eyebrows.
I dashed for the ledge and leaped up it, nearly throwing my lantern and extinguishing it in the process, but Meshack caught the light by its wire handle and caught me by the arm. He helped lift me up and pull me through.
He grabbed the gun out of my hand and pulled the hammer back—which I had not thought to do, for I knew so little about the way these things operate.
Then, with both of us up and the creature’s face biting into the opening where we’d squeezed ourselves, he pulled the trigger. Twice he hit the thing in the face, once in the mouth, I think. It blew back away from us, now sporting a splintered hole in its beak and a badly burned patch on the side of its eye.
Meshack pulled the trigger again but either the gun failed or I did not hear it because I couldn’t hear anything, anymore. The sound of the shot was too much for my already too-much abused ears; something was broken inside them, or inside the left one at any rate.
A stabbing pain shrieked through my skull but there was nothing to do but run, run, climb, and run. It was almost easier when I couldn’t hear, and I couldn’t know the maddening distraction of the furious pursuit at our heels.
Meshack didn’t have to pull me anymore. I labored along beside him, scuffling through the wet and slippery stink of the corridor that was, in some places, almost too narrow to accommodate either one of us.
We pushed our way through, and up, and past.
In the tangling rush of our escape, I passed my nephew in the corridor. That’s how we accomplished our retreat, leapfrogging one another at the side, trying to push on up and past, and knowing (although I could not detect it) that the cacophony of evil bird voices echoed down below.
***
We were walking with our hands as much as our feet, and my hand was a furnace of pain and remarkable, blessed numbness in spots that made me think perhaps I’d damaged something irreparably. For one berzerk moment, I thought perhaps I’d lost the hand altogether, and there was so much disaster chasing from every corner that I’d simply failed to notice.
But then I dropped my knuckles to steady myself, and I did not find the textured stone beneath it.
I felt leather.
I stopped abruptly. Meshack ran into me from behind. I was holding the light; we’d traded for whoever was in front. He didn’t see me, I shouldn’t think—though how I hadn’t seen the dead man is a question I cannot answer.
But there he was, or rather, there was part of him.
There were legs, both of which had been gnawed down to bone at the thigh. There were ribs, too, scattered someplace. All of it was gruesomely fresh, and it must’ve occurred within seconds! What kind of creature—or, I shuddered to think, what appalling number of them—could strip a man down to loose parts in such a brief span of moments?
“Who is it?” Meshack asked. He crawled over to be next to me and repeated himself loudly into my ear, for I hadn’t heard him the first time. A whole choir of bells was banging behind my eyes, rattling my senses even worse than they were already shaken.
“I can’t tell,” I confessed.
“Me neither,” he said, and something in his voice cracked.
Could this be Titus? Or one of the other Manders? Or someone altogether different, whose presence in the cave had gone unknown to us?
I cocked my head to listen to him with my right ear, which caught the words a little more strongly.
He said, “Well, it’s got to be one of them, I guess.”
Meshack was breathing hard, and so was I. We were both bleeding, too, and the scratch on his chest looked bad, but it was caking and clotting, and I hoped it was a good sign. I was still smearing blood every place I laid my hand, and the dull, dismal ache of the pain there felt as if it would eat my whole arm if it were left to rage unchecked.
He said, “I didn’t even hear any screaming.”
“Neither did I.” But of course, I wouldn’t have. I had to watch his mouth to catch all his words. “But you know what this means—it means they aren’t just behind us. They’re ahead of us, too.”
“Ahead of us. Beside us. Behind us.” He grimly ticked off the possibilities.
“Don’t do that,” I begged. “Don’t. We’ll find a way out. You said it yourself, out—or into a defensive position.”
“And you said ‘up.’ Up isn’t getting us very far. It didn’t get him an
ywhere.”
“It’s getting us up,” I argued.
Ahead there was noise of a scuffle and then sounds like whimpering—but we didn’t hear any snapping beaks or cawing whistles except behind us, so we kept on going. How much farther could it be, anyway? How much farther could we go before we ran out of room to retreat?
Before long the way opened, and there was a pit down before us.
The pit wasn’t deep, but it was wide, and it was full. And down in the thick of it, stood Nicodemus—thrashing and throwing things around. My lantern-light waned, and I set it down carefully before it went out all together.
“Meshack, give me your candles if you have them.”
He reached into his satchel and pulled out a pair of fat, home-dipped tapers. I fought to light them from the last bits of the lantern’s failing spark. While I cursed at the reluctant wicks, I tried to ignore Nicodemus and his sputtering, ranting mumble.
“Where is he? The rest of him, it’s in here somewhere. The rest of lots of them, look at them, how long these have been here. Well, he’s new. He’ll be wet. They couldn’t have just swallowed it, all of him, not in that nick of time when they took him and he was gone.”
“Your pa’s dead, Nick,” Meshack said. There wasn’t any unkindness in his words, but he said them firmly. “You left him down in the tunnel.”
“He was right behind me!” our cousin hollered so that even I could hear him without struggling to understand. “And I went back! I went back when I noticed he weren’t breathing and crawling behind me! You know what I found?”
Meshack told him, “I know what you found. We found it too.”
“Why don’t you look at what I found?” He asked it like an invitation. He asked it with a little bit of pride, and a little bit of madness. It wasn’t a question. It was a declaration of insanity.
Just then, the candle wicks caught and our light promptly doubled, then tripled as I urged the second wick into flame. “Nicodemus,” I said, “Your lantern’s failing. Give me your pack, I’ll light your candles…”
I don’t think I managed to chew the whole word out.
As I was speaking, our light lifted up the shadows and I saw what Nicodemus was doing. I saw what he was throwing, and what he was digging his arms down into, lifting up pieces of detritus from the pit and throwing them left and right, over his head, behind himself.